


communion.

by outpastthemoat



Series: song of songs [4]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Fluff, Food, M/M, Thanksgiving
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-26
Updated: 2014-11-26
Packaged: 2018-02-26 21:48:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2667539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/outpastthemoat/pseuds/outpastthemoat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Wherefore, my brethren, when ye come together to eat, tarry one for another.”  - 1 Corinthians 10:33</p>
            </blockquote>





	communion.

Dean’s been hunting for that one recipe for years.  He used to think that he’d find it at one of the roadside diners he and Sam always eat at, because the food they serve is almost like the food his mother used to cook.  He can order roast beef at some of those diners.  He can order sides of mashed potatoes and macaroni and cheese and fried okra.  But he always orders meatloaf when he spies it on the menu.  He always tries it, just in case.  But it’s never the same.  It’s never quite like hers.  

He always asks for the recipe anyway.

The waitresses will sometimes go to the kitchen and talk to the cook, and sometimes the cook will send them back with a 4”x3” index card with ingredients and instructions written down in smudgy black ink or faded pencil, and  Dean keeps them all.  He used to stick them inside his paperbacks like bookmarks, but the cards would fall out, get crumpled, get lost, so he found a shoebox and wedged it in tight under the backseat and that’s where he’s been keeping them for the past eight years.  He never pulled out the box, never took out any of the cards.  There wasn’t any reason to anyway.

\--

Sam was too young to remember, but Dean can recall family dinners. His dad at the head of the table, His mother at the foot, Dean on his father’s left side and Sam in his high chair by Mary.  He remembers his mother cooking dinner every night, going through her recipe book to pick the evening meal.  She had favorites, Dean remembers.  She went through them like clockwork every week.  Dean can still rattle them off, easy: meatloaf, chicken and rice, spaghetti and meatballs, split pea soup, lasagna.  Dean remembers that even on the nights they just had macaroni and cheese for dinner, it was served at the table, eaten off plates with forks and knives like, as Mary would say, laughing, almost civilized people.

Dean’s had time to become tired of the way he and Sam eat.  He’s lived long enough to grow tired of eating fast food out of paper bags, he’s been around long enough to grow weary of dripping fries on the floorboard of the Impala and balancing a Coke between his thighs, steering with his knees while he uses both hands to hold a Big Mac.  He’s had enough time to become tired of eating at crappy diners, sitting across from Sam on ripped vinyl seats and wiping grease from the edges of his mouth with a napkin.  He’s tired of bringing food back to the night’s motel and eating on the beds, leaving ketchup-covered burger wrappers and plastic straws on the bedspreads, leaving greasy stains on the sheets.

Since his mother died, the closest they’ve come to family dinner is stopping to eat at the same booth at Biggerson’s, where they can eat with linen napkins and straws and stainless steel cutlery.

Dean’s started cooking since they started living at the bunker but all Sam knows to do with Dean's meals is to make a plate in the kitchen and sneak away to eat in his room or in the library and leave crumbs on the war table.

Tonight Dean is cooking spaghetti, but it doesn't taste right.  He’s used the off-brand canned tomato sauce and it doesn’t taste the way he remembers.  He bought a box of pasta, but the noodles are all wrong, they’re fat and slimy, not the way they’re supposed to be.  He thinks he might've cook the noodles too long.  He thinks he bought the wrong kind of noodles for spaghetti anyway.  He thinks his mother might’ve used angel hair pasta instead.

Dean takes a plate of pasta back to his room and eats it mournfully on his bed.  Then he dumps his bowl on his end table and falls back on his bed, leaving his fork rattling against the rim.

This isn’t how you’re supposed to eat dinner.  Not alone in your room, with your brother’s shitty Indigo Girls playlist blaring through the walls.

We’re supposed to be a family, Dean thinks.  We’re falling apart.   And no one is going to care enough to stop it from happening.

\--

Dean had found the perfect recipe for meatloaf in a diner in Chicago.  The tables had been covered in blue gingham oilcloth and the tables had been set with small vases filled with dusty plastic carnations.  He’d taken one bite and known right then that it was the one, it was his mom’s, it tasted just like home.  He’d eaten every bite and when the waitress took his plate away, he’d put his head down in his arms on top of the table.  Sam had watched him with wide eyes.  

“Are you all right,?” Sam had asked.  Dean had tried to get him to take a bite of the meatloaf, but Sam wouldn’t.  He’d order a grilled chicken salad.  Dean had tried to shove a forkful of meatloaf into his mouth, and Sam had resisted, dodging Dean’s fork with alarm.

“Yeah,” Dean had said, muffled.  He had sat there like that, resting his head down on the table, until the waitress brought their check.  “It was just right,” he’d said, “it was perfect,” he’d explained, but Sam didn’t understand.  He’d never eaten Mary’s meatloaf.  He didn’t know what he was missing.   

“It was perfect,” Dean had said, but the waitress explained that the recipe was a family secret, they couldn’t share the recipe, Dean couldn’t have it, and Dean had exploded.

Sam had wrestled him back to the car, had gotten Dean to get inside and then he’d locked the doors.  “What the hell?” Sam had asked.  

“It was perfect,” Dean said.  He’d squeezed his hands around the steering wheel so, so tightly.  

Sam had yelled at him more.  “It was just meatloaf,” Sam had said.

Dean had been thinking of the casserole dish Mary had used to cook meatloaf in, an olive-green Pyrex dish with patterns of flowers and leaves around the sides.  He had been thinking of the house after it had burned, of trailing behind his father as they’’d walked through the blacked rooms, stepped carefully around the charred floorboards, and seeing that casserole dish in the wreckage of the kitchen.  Scorched, but not even chipped.  Dean had wanted to take it back to the motel.  The casserole dish had stayed in the kitchen, surrounded by broken glass and shards of Mary’s light blue bone china plates and bowls.  

“Yeah,” he had said.  Sam didn’t know.  Sam had never seen that dish.  Sam had never eaten meatloaf out of a casserole dish before.  “I know.”

\--

He doesn't realize that it's Thanksgiving until the day's almost over.  

Castiel and Sam are arguing.  They do that more and more these days and Dean kind of likes it, even if he's almost certain they're arguing over him.  He thinks it makes them seem more like brothers.  More like family.  Castiel and Sam will shout at each other and Cas will glare and Sam will storm out of the room, but then later Castiel will creep quietly into the library and he’ll wait for Sam to look at him, and then he’ll offer Sam a tentative sort of smile.  And Sam always smiles back.  

Castiel and Sam are arguing and for once, Dean just steps back. Appraises them.  Castiel seems tired and Sam’s hands are shaking just a little, the way they do when he hasn’t slept enough.  

He thinks, They could use a meal.  

Dean tries to work out if Castiel has ever shared a meal with them beyond takeout burritos.  

He can’t come up with anything.

Time to fix that, he reckons.

So he tiptoes away from their raised voices and goes to the kitchen.

\--

He's pulling out the recipe box for the first time in five years.  He bundles the box up in his jacket and carried it inside under his arm and then when he's safely inside the kitchen, he closes the door and opens the lid and spreads out all those old recipes across the counter tops. 

There are dozens of recipes here, not just meatloaf, but for things like the squash casserole and pecan pie Mary had cooked for Thanksgiving, succotash, the potato salad she'd brought to every funeral she'd attended in Lawrence. Dean has found them all, here and there, all over the country.  He'd found her chicken and dumplings in Topeka, he'd found her apple pie in Whitefish.  Dean has traveled all over the country and everywhere he goes he's still looking for his mother.  

Cranberry sauce, giblet gravy, pumpkin pie, bread pudding.  It's all here, right where he'd left it.  It's not exactly like his mother had never left at all.  It's more like finding out that she's been around all along.

They don't have a turkey, they don't have green beans for the casserole or cranberries for the sauce.  But maybe they can have something like Thanksgiving anyway.  Just because they're all here, together.  Like a real family.  Like the kind of family Dean likes to dream about.

\--

His memory's leaky.  Dean's job had always been to set the table for dinner.  He can still remember where everything goes.  Forks and spoons and knives off the sides of the plates, napkins folded into a triangle.  He can remember how he had used to set the table, which is stupid.  He can never remember how his mother made meatloaf, but he can remember how to set a table.  What the hell is wrong with him?  he’s wondering.  Why place settings and not something more important, like his mother's favorite book or the kind of shoes she liked to wear?  Something more important.  

He remembers the smell of meatloaf in the oven.  It might not be Mary's recipe but the meatloaf smells just the same as it smells in his memories. 

Mary baked bread, Dean remembers.  She’d start early in the morning, long before his father had rose from bed and left for work, she’d be in the kitchen with flour on her hands and on her aprons and in her hair.

His hands remember.  He has to read the recipe on the back of the White Lily flour for the right measurements, but his hands know how to work the dough.  Dean thinks he will start to bake bread every morning.  He will get up early, early, before any harsh words have been spoken, before he and Sam eat each other alive.  He will add warm water to the yeast and watch it rise with the sun.  He’ll knead the bread with the heels of his hands.

Sometimes he doesn’t know how to be close to Sam, to Castiel. Sometimes it seems like when he tries to talk, his words come out all wrong.  But here, at this table, they can sit by each other and share what they have.  Dean can put a little part of himself into every loaf of bread and slice of meatloaf and feel like he'd done something important because he's feeding his family.    


\--

When he's done, he goes back out to the library.  Sam is sitting quietly.  Castiel is standing stiffly in the corner. 

"It's Thanksgiving.  There's no turkey.  But there's dinner.  So come eat something,” Dean says, and Sam shoots up out of the chair.  

Castiel stays put.  "I should go," he says.  Sam stops just outside the library.

“Stay for dinner,” Dean says.  He suddenly wants that more than anything else in the entire world.  More than world peace, more than a million bucks.  He just wants to eat dinner with his family.  Like other people do.  He wants to pass Castiel a napkin and ask him about his day.  He wants to have a family dinner the way he dreams about sometimes, about plates heaped with mashed potatoes and gravy, about tablecloths.  About passing Sam the salad bowl.  About offering Castiel seconds and having Castiel say  _yes please._

“I couldn’t,” Castiel says.  But Dean thinks Castiel looks pleased to be asked.  His mouth sort of turns up at one corner.

“You could,” Dean argues.  “You can.”

“There’s not enough,” Castiel says, awkwardly.  

“There’ll be enough.  We’ll share.”  

“I don’t want want to intrude,” Castiel says.  Dean opens his mouth but Sam beats him to it.

"You're not intruding," Sam says.  "You're family."

\--

The table is quiet after dinner.  Sam said thank you and then vanished.  It's just Castiel and Dean still sitting around the table.  Castiel hadn't said anything about the meatloaf tasting like molecules.  He had just said that it was delicious, Dean.  Dean thinks Castiel is waning again.  He'd shoved food in his mouth like he'd been hungry for days.  

Castiel is sliding his fork across his empty plate like he might scrape up some more food if he presses down hard enough, even though he'd had seconds and said no to thirds.  Dean is watching him out of the corner of his eye because he knows Castiel is about to leave and Dean doesn't want him to go.

“Thank you for inviting me,” Castiel says finally.  He puts the fork down.

Dean closes his eyes and for a moment he sees that casserole dish like it was right there in front of him.  "Hey, no problem," Dean says.  "I'm glad you were here."  He opens his eyes and Castiel is pulling out a handful of crumpled dollar bills from one of his pockets.  

“Hey,” Dean says.  Castiel is frowning and sticking his hand back inside his pocket.  “Hey,” Dean says again.  “Cas.  You don't have to do that.”

He puts his hand over Castiel’s, right there on the table.  For anyone to see, if they looked.  Castiel does look.  He keeps his eyes on their hands together on top of the faded floral tablecloth Dean used to cover the table.  

“You didn't have to ask me to stay,” Castiel says.

“Well, I wanted to,” says Dean.  “I just wanted you here.  It was important to me.”

“It’s just dinner,” Castiel says, frowning a little.  

“No it’s not.  This is special.  Having you around.”

“I should pay you back."

"Nah," Dean says. 

“It was nice,” Castiel says, quiet and considering, the way he does when he's talking about something important.  " I feel like..." 

“Like what?”

“Like I’m part of something,” Castiel says thoughtfully.  He smiles then, right at Dean, the kind of blinding smile that could knock you out, if you let it.  Dean lets it.  He lets Castiel's smile hit him so hard that it sends him reeling.

You are, Dean aches to tell him. You are a part of this family.  He's too tired to say all the things he wants to say, like  _don't you know what being part of a family means?  don't you know I'd always be happy to cook you dinner?  don't you know you don't have to pay for that, Cas?_   But Dean is tired and Castiel is still here and there are so many other things Dean needs to tell him. 

Castiel says, "I should go." 

“You can’t leave yet,” Dean says.  “You haven’t had coffee.”  I know you like coffee, he chants to him, come one, come on.  I know you do. More than anything Dean wants to make this last longer than just this one night.  He thinks Castiel is hesitating.  "We've got French Vanilla."

“French Vanilla,” Castiel echoes.

“You like French Vanilla."

“Yes,” says Castiel.  His hand is still underneath Dean's.  Castiel is turning his hand over so that his fingers can curl around Dean's and Dean is suddenly dreaming new, impossible dreams, dreams of dinner together every night, dreams of Castiel folding napkins with a crease between his eyes, dreams of Sam clearing off the table, dreams of sitting right here beside Castiel every night and holding his hand while Castiel finishes his coffee.  He's dreaming of working on perfecting his own meatloaf recipe, not quite what Mary would have made but still pretty good, good enough to keep Castiel coming back for seconds and maybe thirds.  A Dean original.  “I do.”


End file.
